Supersonic gull dream

Is it clear that I’m obsessed with the problem (the dream) of having supersonic commercial flights?

I have never been on a Concorde and I have my (strange and wrong) ideas that it was a colossal hoax, but nonetheless it is so fascinating to think about supersonic transfers…

We already discussed (here and here, for instance) that one of the main issues of such a concept is the noise (the sonic boom).

The Supersonic Aerospace International (SAI) developed a very nice concept (only a concept…) for a potentially boomless supersonic aircraft (with a sonic boom claimed to be 1/100 that of the Concorde). The design is based on a “curved gull-wing, an inverted V-tail, and a curvilinear fuselage”.

WOW. But…

The test flight was planned for the 2011 and the first passengers would have been in 2013. Nothing happen and (both for the business jet-sized Quiet Supersonic Transport (QSST) and for the large-scale plan of having commercial 737-sized transport aircraft) SAI seems having some investors lack and probably any further progress is unlikely.

At the present the QSST development plan (declared both for commercial and military use; the second application is what makes me a bit more confident about the project) considers a test flight in 2017 and passengers in 2018 (and 80 million dollar per aircraft expected).

What a pity (?)

WU

PS. Do you know who is the funder of SAI? Michael Paulson, son of Gulfstream Aerospace founder Allen Paulson…